If I Was Your Girl

As I spoke I thought back to what Virginia had said weeks before, about getting anything you wanted if you let yourself believe you deserved it. For as long as I could remember, I had been apologizing for existing, for trying to be who I was, to live the life I was meant to lead. Maybe this would be the last conversation I would ever have with Grant. Maybe not. Either way, I realized, I wasn’t sorry I existed anymore. I deserved to live. I deserved to find love. I knew now—I believed, now—that I deserved to be loved.

“this is wonderful. I don’t know what to say.”

“Yeah,” Grant said. I realized he was staring at me. “You make me feel that way a lot.”

“You can have anything,” she said, “once you admit you deserve it.”

my biggest secret isn’t that I’m bi,” Bee said, leaning forward slightly. I cocked my head and listened. “I was raped in tenth grade.”

“Oh my God,” I said, covering my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

“Whatever,” Bee said, waving my condolences away and snapping a few pictures. “It’s not a … I mean, it was a big deal. I needed therapy and shit. But it’s not why I am who I am or whatever.

It’s what I’ve wanted for so long, but it’s scary too. It’s scary to think of leaving here, of being so far from my parents and everything I know. But then it’s the only way I can be really free, that I can finally live somewhere that people understand me.

I felt hot tears coming but I blinked them away. I watched my reflection in the car window, beyond it trees and dusty road passing in a blur. “I just want to have a normal life.”

“And I just want you to live past your senior year,” Dad said, his jaw clenched. He let out a long breath. “People like you get killed by people like him.”

“Everybody’s got a past,” he said. “That don’t mean you can’t have a future.”

I was never going to be free of my past; it was always going to be there, waiting to suck me in and crush me like a black hole. The only way to escape it was to keep moving.

A bubble hovered at my mind’s edge, waiting to pop. I existed in the moment, free from the past and the future.

You don’t have to share anything with me unless you want to, you know, create something worth creating.